At 7 p.m. or so on Friday, January 16, 1885, Samuel Stillman Conant, editor of Harper’s Weekly for the previous 15 years, left the magazine’s offices on Franklin Square in Lower Manhattan. He had sent his next issue to press and was presumably heading home to Brooklyn for dinner.
He never made it.
Conant’s family first assumed that he had been detained by business. But on Saturday, when there was still no sign of the 53-year-old editor, his adult son went looking for him. That proved fruitless, so the family called on the Pinkerton detective agency to investigate.
Several of Conant’s acquaintances claimed to have seen him in Manhattan on Saturday, the 17th. A tobacconist he frequented for cigars reported seeing him there on Monday, the 19th. Another friend said he’d seen him around midday on Tuesday, the 20th.
One of the most detailed accounts of Conant’s movements appeared in the New York Times, where he had worked before going to Harper’s Weekly. It reported that he took a train to Coney Island on Tuesday, had a cigar and one or two glasses of ale at a local hotel, and apparently spent the night sleeping outdoors in a wooden shelter. The next morning he returned to the hotel, had another glass of ale, read the morning paper, and dozed off; the Times added that he “seemed dazed and stupid.”
Later that day, Conant borrowed $5 from the hotel bartender, leaving his watch and chain as collateral. On Thursday, January 22, he was seen boarding a 7:55 p.m. train to Brooklyn. “Here,” the Times reported, “the trail is lost.”
Giving some credence to this account, Conant’s son later identified the watch as belonging to his father.
In the days and weeks following the disappearance, witnesses reported seeing Conant strolling on Broadway, buying a train ticket for Jacksonville, Florida, and wandering around the wilds of Kentucky.
Grasping for an explanation of Conant’s behavior, some observers made the case that he must have lost his mind.
“The theory that he has been stricken with a mental derangement, and is wandering about the country in an irresponsible condition is still held by many of his friends, and others are strong in the belief that he has gone to Europe,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported.
Based on information from “an intimate friend” of the Conant family, the New-York Tribune reported that, in recent months, “He was troubled with sudden lapses of memory, and after conversing clearly and intelligently on a subject for some time would soon after recur to it again with a complete forgetfulness of any former reference to it.”
According the Tribune’s diagnosis, “That this was due entirely to over-work and the habit of keeping late hours seems plain…. Not only had he the onerous work of editing the paper with which he was connected, but he had also to read many manuscripts which were submitted to his employers for publication.”
Conant’s colleagues at Harper & Brothers denied that he was overworked but seemed otherwise mystified. A man identified only as “Mr. Harper” said Conant had been in good spirits that Friday and speculated that “an apoplectic attack had caused a temporary mental indisposition.” He also denied a rumor that Conant had recently resigned his job.
R. R. Sinclair, Conant’s assistant, told the Tribune that, “Mr. Conant was in splendid health apparently, and was the best balanced man I ever saw.” Even so, Sinclair had placed a rather ominous personal ad in a newspaper on the Wednesday after Conant’s disappearance: “To S.S.C. — As a friend and a brother, I earnestly ask you to come home. H. and T. [presumably Conant’s wife, Helen, and son, Thomas] are both sick from grief and anxiety. If you communicate with me, any trouble will easily be arranged.”
When a largely decomposed corpse was discovered in a Coney Island creek in April 1885, the mystery appeared to be solved. Ditto a skeleton found in a Long Island sand dune in December 1890. Neither turned out to be Conant.
Meanwhile, the speculation continued. T. C. Evans, an author who had known Conant for 30 years, wrote in 1889 that, “The general belief… is that, like Senator Rufus King before him, he sprang overboard from a ferry boat at night, unseen by anybody, having previously put weights in his pockets, that he might sink and disappear instantly, leaving no trace behind him.” (The Senator King that Evans is referring to here was actually Preston King, who jumped off a Hoboken ferry in 1865; his suicide was covered by, among other publications, Conant’s own Harper’s Weekly.)
Amelia E. Barr, a popular British author whose work Conant often published, doubted the suicide theory but suspected some kind of misadventure. She wrote in her 1913 autobiography about “an evil dream” she’d had before learning about the disappearance: “I had dreamed three nights previously of standing in Park Row, and looking up to an angry cloud-tossed sky. On this sky I saw the initials S. S. C. blazoned in immense black letters, and, as I watched, great masses of vengeful storm clouds came swiftly toward them, and drove them with a wild passion over the firmament, and out of sight. The dream made a profound impression on me, and when [my daughter] Lilly told me S.S.C. was lost, I answered, ‘He will not be found.’”
The investigative reporter Julius Chambers, then a Brooklyn Eagle columnist, revisited the case in 1919: “My theory always has been that he set out to go to Fulton Market for a sea food meal, took a short cut through Water Street, was set upon by thugs that frequented that locality — almost deserted at the noon hour — was dragged into one of the low drinking places and, when he put up a fight, was killed, robbed and his body thrown into one of the sewers emptying into the East River.”
That was 100 years ago, and to this day, it may be as good a guess as any.